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INGREDIENTS.
Mayonnaise, or sauce tartare.
Lobster cutlets. 2 tablespoonfuls of butter. 1/3 a cup of flour.
Salt and paprica.
1 cup of milk.
Lobster coral.
1 tablespoonful of butter.
I yolk of egg.
1 teaspoonful of lemon juice. 2 cups of lobster meat. 3 cups of aspic jelly.
Method. - Make a white sauce of the butter, flour, seasonings and milk; add the coral and butter, after pounding until smooth in a mortar, also the yolk of egg, beaten and diluted with the lemon juice, and the lobster meat chopped rather coarsely. When cold shape into cutlets, dust over with sifted coral, and insert a bit of feeler or claw into the small end of each. Pour a little aspic into a dish, and, when it sets, arrange the cutlets upon it a little distance apart; pour over each a few spoonfuls of aspic, and when set cover with more aspic. When cold and very firm cut out the cutlets, giving a border of aspic to each.
Marinate the flesh of the other lobster, cut into cubes, with French dressing; pile in a mound on a bed of lettuce leaves. Insert a tuft of leaves in the top, and arrange the cutlets against the mound.
Garnish with feelers and claws. Serve mayonnaise or sauce tartare with the salad.
This is a composed lobster salad in the grand style: a croquette mixture shaped into mock chops, glazed in aspic, and banked against a mound of dressed lobster cubes. The text assumes two boiled lobsters, a mortar, and a cook who already knows how to make aspic.
- Get the binding sauce rightTwo tablespoons butter, 1/3 cup flour and 1 cup milk is a panada, not a pouring sauce — it should be stiff enough to leave the pan in a mass. Cook it a full two or three minutes to lose the raw flour taste, since nothing here is cooked again.
- The yolk needs heatThe egg yolk is stirred into the hot sauce and then everything is served cold. Return the pan to low heat for a minute or two after adding it so the yolk actually cooks; the mixture is thick enough that it will not curdle if stirred.
- CoralThe coral is the roe of a female lobster, dark green when raw and coral-red once cooked. Only hen lobsters carry it, so it is worth asking the fishmonger; the recipe already assumes two lobsters. Without coral the cutlets are pale and the recipe loses its colour, and a little tomato paste is sometimes suggested as a stand-in for the colour, though the flavour is not the same.
- Feelers and clawsA "feeler" is an antenna. The thin tip of an antenna or the pointed end of a small claw shell is pushed into each cutlet to imitate the bone of a lamb chop — purely decorative, and it should be removed before eating.
- Aspic jellyThree cups of savory jelly, made in this period from strong veal or fish stock cleared with egg white and set with gelatin or calf's foot. A modern equivalent is 3 cups of well-flavored, well-clarified stock with about 2 1/2 to 3 tablespoons of powdered gelatin — firm enough to cut cleanly, which is what the recipe demands.
- Chill hard between layersThis is the hinge. Each aspic layer must be fully set and cold before the next goes on, and the mixture must be thoroughly cold before shaping or the cutlets will slump. Work in the refrigerator's timing, not the clock's.
- Paprica and French dressing"Paprica" is paprika, generally the sweet sort rather than hot. "French dressing" in this period means oil and vinegar beaten with salt and pepper — proportions vary in contemporary cookbooks, commonly somewhere between two and four parts oil to one of vinegar — not the sweetened, emulsified bottled dressing of later date.
- YieldThe recipe assumes two lobsters: 2 cups of picked meat for the cutlet mixture, and the flesh of the second cut into cubes for the mound. How many cutlets and how many servings you get depends on the size of the lobsters.
- Keep it cold on the tableAspic softens quickly at room temperature and this is cooked shellfish held cold for hours. Assemble ahead, refrigerate until the moment of serving, and do not let the platter sit out.
Janet McKenzie Hill compiled Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties around 1900, when she was editing the Boston Cooking School Magazine, and the book is a fair record of what an ambitious American hostess of that decade thought elegant: moulded jelly, piped garnish, and food shaped to look like other food. "Lobster cutlets" are a croquette mixture pressed into the outline of a lamb chop, with a bit of shell standing in for the protruding bone — a conceit borrowed from French kitchen practice, where côtelettes of salmon, chicken or game were standard buffet work. Aspic did double duty in the era before reliable refrigeration: it sealed the surface of cold fish and meat against the air while making a plate look glazed and formal. The heavy reliance on lobster coral for color belongs to a time when lobster was a fashionable and costly item — which is precisely why it appears in a book of party dishes — and no part of one was wasted.